[electromagnetic]

As a writer I'd agree with your statement. I've also read a lot about young writers and there are very few specifically for this reason, not necessarily for a lack of creativity but for the inability to produce something believable.

How can a 15 year old write believably about relationships, or going to a bar or club, or any of these things. Experience can easily be transposed from one place to another; aka, you don't have to get kicked in the gut to know it's going to hurt a lot, just like you don't need to win the PGA tour to write how great it would feel to win it. However, if you've never won anything or felt any sense of achievement, it has to be exceptionally hard to write convincingly about someone winning.

I think this is why most writers begin appearing in their 20's (I believe it depends on region, I've seen more early-20's writers from the UK, where you graduate high-school at 16, than from the US, where you graduate high-school at 18) when they've had many formative experiences and they start experiencing the real world. When they start to see hardship and all the rest that comes with adulthood.

[unalone]

That's also why prosists tend to be older than poets. Poetry doesn't require the deep relationships between subject and style that prose (especially longer prose) does.

I remember trying to write about romance at the tender age of 13. Writing kisses without ever having had a kiss leads to hilariously bad results. For that reason, I don't write about sex right now: I'd not like to see myself made a fool of again.

[electromagnetic]

Well I'm trying to avoid sex as a matter of style, my main character is 17 so I think it would be tasteless anyway. I mean if the Twilight series can have such a rabid fan following, I don't believe there's a need for a sex scene unless there's an actual point to it.

I'd also say 95% of books and movies get sex completely wrong anyway because it's added in out of irrelevance. It's like the author had to add an extra 5,000 words to meet their contract and added in a random sex scene. I mean there's an actual award for worst sex scene, which kind of helps make my point.

I think very few books would actually be worse off without a sex scene.

[unalone]

Sex is a useful tool in a book if it's used well. Same thing with kissing, which Twilight uses for its disgusting soft pornography. But both are misused more often than not.

(Twilight teaches an important and saddening lesson, namely: if you give people exactly what they think they want, they'll be content and you'll be successful. I can't like people who like Twilight for exactly that reason. It's the easy path that takes no effort and creates nothing but wasteful noise, and while I don't dislike Stephanie Meyer for being a lazy writer, I dislike the people who reward her effort.

[electromagnetic]

Twilight never really bothered me, it's Harry Potter that really irked me. I can't stand the constant cliches, the bad metaphors, hypocrisy, her use of every adverb in the English language and the patronizing old-schoolboy crap British schooling hasn't been like since decades before even I was born.

I mean what's the whole deal with Dumbledore essentially saying "it's not what you're born with that matters, it's what you choose", but everyone in the school is there not because they chose, but because they were born that way.

[unalone]

See, Harry Potter I love. I don't call it perfect, but I'd say it's the best children's lit I've read, despite the fact that Rowling's writing isn't as good as Lewis's or Pullman's.

As I wrote on another thread yesterday: Rowling's point is that we're not born equal. People are born more talented than other people. That's a fact. What doesn't change between people is that we can all choose how to live despite what we were born with. You can be brilliant and still be an awful person. Similarly, you can be pretty talentless and still do some great things.

Her writing never strikes me as bad. I know the criticisms, and I can see them when I read, but it's an acceptable level of bad. It gets out of the way to make room for her plot, which is one of the best plots I've found in any series (she writes mystery better than anybody), and for her characters, and her characters are among the best in literature. She has an extremely subtle hand at creating character traits, and a lot of people miss that because they feel that the way they feel about the characters is so obvious that it must be because she states things in an obvious manner, which she doesn't.

(I wrote my senior thesis paper on Harry Potter, and I have a huge essay crammed in my throat that's waiting for me to write once I have some of my other writing plans out of the way.)

Twilight, on the other hand, is awful in every way. The characters are terrible. The writing is sawdust. The plot and the morals are such a step back from the shades-of-grey of Harry Potter that I want to slap Meyer and all her fans in one grand-tour slapfest. Perhaps you escaped college before Twilight hit, but it brings out the worst in its fans. I cannot think of a single redeeming feature of the entire series.

[electromagnetic]

I think my hatred for Harry Potter isn't completely because of the fact that I hate the series. I believe it comes more from the fact that the English school system proposed placing it on the national curriculum's book list and were planning to remove either Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Flies. Thankfully they completely changed this, allowing teachers to teach whatever books they want as long as they were established texts, which included Harry Potter.

I believe the rest of my distaste for the series came from when the books were initially released. There was such hype over a kids book and in my free time I was reading many of the sci-fi classics, and when I finally got to reading Harry Potter it was just an extremely campy version of Ender's Game. I believe even Orson Scott Card (who's a fan of Harry Potter) pointed this out when J.K. Rowling targeted her own fans for the Harry Potter lexicon for 'stealing her ideas'.

I'm fully aware of all that's wrong with the Twilight novels, but it never really bothered me and I've generally avoided books written in first person. However, I came from the UK so I never read or heard anything until I was ambushed into reading it by my (then fiancee) wife, I'd given her like my favorite book of all time to read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and she gave me Twilight, which wasn't exactly a fair trade: 200 page book at like 4x5 vs 500 page at 5x7. Then, of course, the movie came out and her friend just happened to have extra tickets for the opening night. I believe that's the easiest I've ever been tricked.

Although, rather ironically, I believe I've contributed more money to Rowling and the Harry Potter series as I have watched most of the movies and eventually actually paid to see the most recent one, and I've yet to give a penny to Mayer.